"Faith is, fundamentally, the process of maintaining beliefs in the face of 1) absent evidence and 2) conflicting evidence."
That's your definition. There are multiple different definitions, even in a dictionary. It is an error to choose one and insist that it applies to all things that get the word "faith" applied to them. Definitions do not have that power. It's a common error, but an error nonetheless.
A definition I find much more useful, the relevant metric of a definition, is that faith in a statement is acting as if the statement is true. I sit in a chair and by doing so demonstrate faith that it will hold my weight. I have in the past sat in chairs where my faith was misplaced, so this isn't even a faked up academic point, I really do have less than 100% confidence in this statement from either a Bayesian or a frequentist point of view, but nevertheless I have this faith and act on it.
In my opinion, this is a much more useful way of understanding it, and in particular as my example shows actually reaches well beyond the "merely religious"; matters of this sort of faith come up in all sorts of places, including science and engineering. I readily agree in advance that scientific faith and religious faith are not the same thing, but they are points on a continuum, not binary opposites, and ultimately we must all have some sort of faith in the things that are beyond the purview of science, which, regrettably, includes rather a lot of very important things.
Push comes to shove I don't have enough evidence to accept any cosmology as 100% likely to be true. Per that article about archilects a few days ago, some form of Intelligent Design is a lot lot less "stupid" than people think; strict atheism is nowhere near as casually obvious as it was forty years ago. (We have a tentative-but-developing recipe for building gods, things that would make the Greek gods look like children by comparison. You may have faith that no such entity anywhere ever been created (by any means), but you really can't prove it, nor can you prove that no such entity lies somewhere in our history or possibly at the root of the current universe.) Yet by my actions I demonstrate faith in some belief. So do you. Neither of us have 100% confidence in the strict mathematical sense. If there's some way to get to 100% confidence, I don't know what it is.
The definition of faith as "choosing to believe things you know are false" is not a useful definition in describing or learning about the world. It's a rhetorical beating stick that allows you to dismiss claims without having to examine them. And you have not done the real work necessary to make your point relevant, which is to establish that your particular definition applies to the person in question with evidence beyond mere assertion.